DFPE: Explaining Predictive Models for Disk Failure Prediction

Recent research works on disk failure prediction achieve a high detection rate and a low false alarm rate with complex models at the cost of explainability. The lack of explainability is likely to hide bias or overfitting in the models, resulting in bad performance in real-world applications. To address the problem, we propose a new explanation method DFPE designed for disk failure prediction to explain failure predictions made by a model and infer prediction rules learned by a model. DFPE explains failure predictions by performing a series of replacement tests to find out the failure causes while it explains models by aggregating explanations for the failure predictions. A presented use case on a real-world dataset shows that compared to current explanation methods, DFPE can explain more about failure predictions and models with more accuracy. Thus it helps to target and handle the hidden bias and overfitting, measures feature importances from a new perspective and enables intelligent failure handling.